Man's consciousness of his inhumanity and indivinity are transmuted in his uninstructed imagination into the monstrous phantom--Sin; something so heinous and detestable interpenetrating all his being, works and ways, that many of the subtlest intelligences and most upright minds have found no relief from its remorseful obsession except in the atonement of Christ and faith in an immaterial future; or, more courageously, in a remorseless despair and the resolute acceptance of the postulate that life is a thing that should never have been. It has been left to me to show that this inhumanity, this indivinity, this Sin, has, like all man's ideas, conceptions, and fantasies, a Material source in the properties of the forms of Matter of which man consists. In expounding my new poetry I am at an immense disadvantage in one regard--that the latent forces of expansion and chemical affinity, the active electrical, magnetic, radiant and cohesive energies, and the perpetuity of molecular and interatomical motions in the oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, etc., of the Matter of man are as yet only vaguely conceived, so far at least as they relate to himself, in the mind of the reader. I must therefore reiterate that these forces, converted into anabolic and katabolic activities, into vitality, nervous energy, reproductive power, into love, hate, thought, imagination, into consciousness and self-consciousness, are the fount of man's notion that there is within him, and without, something other than Matter and its properties of form and energy: it is these material forces that man has ignorantly christened soul or spirit, with the immaterial significance of these words. Now no one in love feels sinful; no one in a passion of any kind feels sinful; no man gloriously drunk feels sinful; no deep-set ambition ever accuses itself of sin; an entirely healthy nature living a healthy life knows nothing of sin. Conviction of Sin has always been a limited experience. There have been, are, and will be, powerful and most Material natures, unaffected except temporarily and superficially by bouts of debauchery, prolonged mental strain, and the commission of every crime. Conviction of Sin, alike in the offspring of worn-out stock--epileptics, consumptives, neuropaths, mattoids, weak-bodied and weak-minded people generally--as in ordinary healthy natures, is the effect of the exhaustion of the Material forces of the Matter of man. The exhaustion may proceed from dissipation, from prolonged domestic or financial worry, or--not to multiply instances--it may be the result of the enormous discharge of nervous energy and the upheaval of the whole nature in the commission of a murder or the betrayal of a friend. But no ordinary, healthy man is ever convicted of Sin before the act, or in the act; the degenerate whose normal state is one of conscious sinfulness, feels for the moment deified upon the sudden access of energy that leads him into crime; and the outcast, when he learns to say, "Evil, be thou my good," stumbles, although unconsciously, upon the tremendous knowledge that the categoric imperative is the discharge of the material forces of Matter, whether the discharge be by the lightnings of the clouds, in the seismal throes of earth, or through the passion and imagination of men and women. Sin, then, is the exhaustion of the material forces of man. Discharges of force in ways of pleasure, in moods of delight, in trances of ecstasy, as well as discharges of force in feelings of rancour, jealousy, and malice, in deeds of lust, slaughter, and treachery, have alike to bear the unhallowed name of the succeeding reaction. It is a species of vengeance, this transference of the title Sin from the impotence of the spent Matter to the energy that was expended. The degenerate suffers because his forefathers used up the energies of the stock in enjoyment; the debauchee suffers by the over-discharge of his own force; and both feel a vengeful pleasure in transferring the moral nickname of their enfeebled condition to the innocent, whole-hearted liberty and power of the days of exuberant health. It is the meanest, most cowardly thing man has done to call his courage Sin: by this vengeance the enfeebled Matter of man obtains such pitiful satisfaction as an infant does when it calls the floor upon which it has broken its brow "bad," and invites its nurse to whip the offender. An apologue:--A bee, seized with an access of Quixotic daring, exhausted its sting in the neck of a quite harmless tourist, and shortly lay buzzing its last and lamenting its guilt. "What a sinner I have been!" the bee buzzed. A hornet flounced up and asked the bee what ailed it.